Discoveries

November 16, 2013 | By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

Getting a dual American premiere Saturday, via Discovery and Science Channel, "The Challenger Disaster" is a BBC-made TV movie about physicist Richard Feynman (William Hurt) and the investigation into the causes of the 1986 space shuttle explosion. It is a kind of scientific "All the President's Men," including moody night scenes in the nation's capitol, microfiche, phone-booth calls and self-protecting sources guiding Feynman, who served on the commission convened to investigate the accident, toward the truth.

"Anyone who writes about Druids and mysteriously coordinated landscapes," Graham Robb admits, "must expect to be treated with suspicion. " Indeed, although the Druids were the learned elite of the ancient Celts, they are better known today as the inspiration for such flaky goings on as the gathering at Stonehenge of ersatz Druids in white robes celebrating the summer solstice. (Stonehenge actually antedates the Druids by millenniums.) They seem an odd subject for the critically praised biographer of Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud, a historian whose previous works seldom look back further than the French Revolution.

Discovery Communications Inc. Executive Chairman John S. Hendricks has exercised stock options worth $12.7 million, according to a regulatory filing. The 61-year-old company founder sold 144,179 shares of Discovery common stock on Oct. 31 for prices ranging from $85.75 a share to $88.92 a share, according to a filing late Monday with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Hendricks had accumulated the options several years ago as part of his long-term compensation program. He benefited from the company's soaring value, although the timing of the stock sale was part of a predetermined schedule. ON LOCATION: Where the cameras roll Discovery stock has increased 60% during the last year; it closed Monday at $87.07 a share.

You never know what you might see in Reno. On our first night in town, my wife and 6-year-old daughter called me to look out the window of our 27th-story hotel room. There, in the center of town, was a brilliant fireworks display - an appropriate welcome to this Nevada town full of flash and color. Although there is a plethora of casinos and night life, we found this mini-Vegas to be offbeat and kid-friendly. It's also affordable: two nights at Circus Circus cost about $175, a buffet dinner for two at the Silver Legacy was $50 and the Discovery Museum cost $24 for two adults and one child.

A veteran cold case detective ignored a key piece of evidence in an unsolved slaying, delaying for several years the eventual discovery that Stephanie Lazarus, a Los Angeles police officer, was guilty of the killing, according to allegations in a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The suit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court by Jennifer Francis, an analyst in the LAPD's DNA laboratory. In it, Francis accused Cliff Shepard, a highly regarded investigator who recently retired, of disregarding the results of DNA tests she performed in the case.

In the humid foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, deep within a carnivore's bloody lair, an early human ancestor fought a life-or-death struggle, and lost. He had entered the den on a scavenging mission, possibly with several others. Their plan: Use a stone to scrape meat from the bones of freshly killed prey, then flee before a saber-tooth cat or other giant predator caught him in the act. "It seems that they were fighting for the carcasses, and unfortunately ... they were not always successful," said David Lordkipanidze, a paleoanthropologist and director of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi.

Max Ataka loves insects. All kinds, from the beetles on his T-shirt to the Anise swallowtail butterfly perched on the back of his hand. The 12-year-old loves the colors, the weird behaviors, the fact that he can actually handle them. "When I was a baby, my first insect was a grasshopper," he said, recalling the memory as if it were from a distant era. Max is the youngest member of the Lorquin Entomological Society, an organization of Southern Californians who prefer six legs to four (or two)

Discovery has announced the development of a new miniseries adaptation of John Jakes' trilogy of "North and South" novels set during run-up to the Civil War. According to Discovery, the miniseries will tell the tale of two families, the Hazards, from the North, and the Mains, from the South, chronicling how the two families grew close and were then tested when the war between the Union and Confederate armies threatened to tear them apart. This isn't the first time Jakes' trilogy has been adapted for the miniseries format.

Discovery Channel's Shark Week has begun to gobble up social media attention, as fin fans turned to Twitter to discuss the first special, "Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives," about a hunt for a killer shark off the coast of South Africa. Two Shark Week programs broke into the top 10 most talked about TV shows on Twitter for the week of July 29-Aug. 4, according to SocialGuide, which ranks the most social TV programs ranked by activity on the social media site. The network did plenty to fan the Twitter frenzy, including hosting a Google+ Hangout at the National Aquarium's Blacktip Reef in Baltimore, an exhibit swarming with sharks.

Discovery Channel's 26th edition of "Shark Week" kicked off Sunday night with the highest ratings in the history of the annual shark-related programming week. The Sunday night airing of "Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives," grabbed 4.8 million viewers, making it the single most-watched "Shark Week" episode to date. The premiere episode of "Shark After Dark," the channel's "Talking Dead"-style shark-related talk show grabbed a respectable 2.1 million viewers. PHOTOS: Hollywood backlot moments Discovery has boosted its programming for this year's edition, with 11 new shark specials, up from eight the previous year.